This is a review of what I had posted on my website with respect to a change that Google had announced with respect to the security of searches and the reasons they claimed that they were making the changes. I thought, as did others, that the change was more to keep the information and metrics within the Google fold, G+, rather than anything to do with security.
The change claimed that the search terms that a visitor had used to find your site would not show in Google Analytics (exact quote shown below) only that the search would be seen as "organic". This has proven to be the case as a lot of the searches that I see hitting this blog the keyword is reporting as "not set" or "not provided" (I think that it is the former that indicates that the visitor is signed in the their Google account).
The reason for this re-posting is that it seems that the reporting of keywords in Google Analytics is proving to be of less and less value. What was an excellent way of determining what visitors where looking for it now seems that the location, City - Region - Country) is of more use. It is also observed that the visits logged as "not set" appear as bounce rate and exit of less than 100% but no navigation history is logged in Analytics.
The trigger for this was that I was trying to determine why a visitor was interested in CRM systems but I could not see what they were searching for. This was a visitor from Nice, France - the Bounce and Exit were 100% but this was more to do with the lack of links on the page: CRM - Customer Relationship Management. This has now been fixed along with the "open the outbound links in a new window" - which should result on the visitor staying on my blog and hopefully clicking on something else, thus recording a paper trail.
What Google say about being "signed-in":
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google "organic" search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren't signed in and visits from Google "cpc".
The change claimed that the search terms that a visitor had used to find your site would not show in Google Analytics (exact quote shown below) only that the search would be seen as "organic". This has proven to be the case as a lot of the searches that I see hitting this blog the keyword is reporting as "not set" or "not provided" (I think that it is the former that indicates that the visitor is signed in the their Google account).
The reason for this re-posting is that it seems that the reporting of keywords in Google Analytics is proving to be of less and less value. What was an excellent way of determining what visitors where looking for it now seems that the location, City - Region - Country) is of more use. It is also observed that the visits logged as "not set" appear as bounce rate and exit of less than 100% but no navigation history is logged in Analytics.
The trigger for this was that I was trying to determine why a visitor was interested in CRM systems but I could not see what they were searching for. This was a visitor from Nice, France - the Bounce and Exit were 100% but this was more to do with the lack of links on the page: CRM - Customer Relationship Management. This has now been fixed along with the "open the outbound links in a new window" - which should result on the visitor staying on my blog and hopefully clicking on something else, thus recording a paper trail.
What Google say about being "signed-in":
When a signed in user visits your site from an organic Google search, all web analytics services, including Google Analytics, will continue to recognize the visit as Google "organic" search, but will no longer report the query terms that the user searched on to reach your site. Keep in mind that the change will affect only a minority of your traffic. You will continue to see aggregate query data with no change, including visits from users who aren't signed in and visits from Google "cpc".
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